16.2054, Review: General Ling/South Asian Lang: Singh (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2054. Sat Jul 02 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2054, Review: General Ling/South Asian Lang: Singh (2004)

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1)
Date: 01-Jul-2005
From: Sanford Steever < sbsteever at yahoo.com >
Subject: The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2005 16:37:25
From: Sanford Steever < sbsteever at yahoo.com >
Subject: The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 
 

EDITOR: Singh, Rajendra
TITLE: The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-3365.html


Sanford B. Steever, unaffiliated scholar

OVERVIEW

The latest in a series of yearbooks, "The Yearbook of South Asian 
Languages and Linguistics" 2004 is more than a simple collection of 
papers. It contains invited articles, referred papers, regional reports, 
book reviews, and dialogs, all aimed at giving the reader a cross-
section of the state of current and on-going research on the 
languages and linguistics of the South Asian linguistic area.

SYNOPSIS

The first of two invited articles, Donegan and Stampe's "Rhythm and 
the synthetic drift of Munda" (pp. 3-36) puts forth the thesis that many 
of the features of Munda languages that are traditionally said to be 
Indic are due less to areal influence from Indo-Aryan and Dravidian 
languages and more to a shift from a rising to a falling phrase and 
word rhythm that accompanies, if not precipitates, correlative shifts in 
other levels of grammar, such as a change from head-initial to head-
final marking and a drift from analysis to synthesis. The various 
changes in Munda are contrasted with other Austro-Asiatic languages 
not found in South Asia, as well as Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. The 
changes within Munda are held to be primarily the result of internal 
changes within the various languages, with areal influence playing at 
best a secondary role.

Singh and Singh's paper, "The possible and the impossible in Bengali 
word formation: some problems in nominalization (pp. 37-53)," looks at 
three kinds of nominalization that a Bangla verb can undergo. The 
authors seek to determine why some verbs, but not others, undergo 
the individual kinds of nominalization. While no specific motivations 
can be teased out for individual variations, the authors determine that 
certain nominalizations are slowly spreading through the lexicon.

Annamalai's first paper, "Case and argument structure in Tamil (pp. 
57-99)," discusses the alignment in Tamil of case marking, semantic 
roles and argument structure. He broadly construes case marking to 
include bound case suffixes, postpositions and complexes of suffixes 
and postpositions. He presents and discusses several discontinuities 
between these three dimensions of linguistic structure, incidentally 
providing one of the most extensive treatments of case and case 
marking in Tamil yet to appear.

Paul's "The semantics of Bangla compound verbs" (pp.101-111) 
studies whether certain Bangla compound verb constructions can be 
brought under the heading of aspect, broadly construed, by using 
Langacker's concept of profiling. The aspectual verb in such 
compounds typically profiles  a specific facet of the event named by 
the verb it modifies, whereas using the simple, unmodified "main" verb 
by itself does not provide such a specification. 

Vasisth's "Discourse content and word order preferences in Hindi" 
(pp. 113-127) attempts to determine what kinds of processing factors 
condition the acceptability of certain Hindi sentences with non-
canonical word order. He examines the distance hypothesis, i.e., the 
greater the raw distance between a dependent and its head, the more 
difficulty in processing, as against the discourse context hypothesis, 
which claims that as the number of new referents between 
dependents and heads increases, the greater the difficulty in 
processing.  Through a series of experiments designed to clarify the 
empirical consequences of the two hypotheses, Vasisth shows that 
the two appear to be differentially sensitive to the distinction between 
indirect objects and direct objects.

The first of the regional reports, Peterson's "Europe" (pp. 131-144) is 
a discussion of the recent scholarly literature on South Asian 
languages and linguistics originating from Europe-based scholars. 
While Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic are well enough 
represented, Dravidian is not. As with the other regional reports, it 
provides a strong bibliography.

Annamalai's second contribution, "An interpretive survey of Tamil 
studies in Tamil (pp. 145-162)," looks at two distinct ways in which the 
Tamil language is approached and studied in Tamil language 
publications. While there are examples of modern linguistic studies of 
the language, much of what appears is written by language mavens, 
traditionalists or pundits. With some notable exceptions, the insights of 
modern linguistics appear not to have deeply penetrated Tamil 
language publishing.

Bhatia's "North America" (pp. 163-172) looks at articles, books and 
dissertations originating in North America, predominantly the United 
States. Here Dravidian is better served. One important issue Bhatia 
takes up is the development of interactive teaching materials for South 
Asian languages. In the course of this discussion, he laments the lack 
of non-western fonts by commercial enterprises. This is, of course, 
becoming less of a problem as fonts and font libraries are developed 
here and in South Asia.

Kandiah's contribution (pp. 173-196) discusses how the ideology of 
postcolonialism is affecting language scholarship and language 
teaching in contemporary Sri Lanka, a debate that has many echoes 
throughout the subcontinent. Much of the article treats attempts to 
disengage the use of English as part of Sri Lanka's colonial heritage, 
and the consequences of doing so, particularly in the field of 
education.

Smith, Paauw and Hussainmiya's article on Sri Lanka Malay (pp. 173-
215) is a very valuable introduction to a Malay-based creole in Sri 
Lanka that has been strongly influenced by Tamil (where one can 
distinguish between Tamil and Sinhala in terms of typology). This 
article provides a thumb-nail sketch of the language and its 
community, and points out several pertinent areas for future research.

The five book reviews include Bakker's review of Bhaskararao and 
Subbarao's "The Tokyo symposium on South Asian languages" (pp. 
217-223), Lindstedt's review of "Dasgupta, Ford and Singh's "After 
etymology: Towards a substantive linguistics" (pp. 224-225), 
Bubenik's review of Deshpande and Hook's "Indian linguistic studies. 
Festschrift in honor of George Cardona" (pp. 229-235), Itiaz Hasnain's 
review of Itagi and Singh's "Linguistic landscaping in India with 
particular reference to the new states" (pp. 236-238) and 
Zuckermann's review of Kuczkiewicz-Fras' "Perso-Arabic hybrids in 
Hindi" (pp. 239-244). These reviews appear, on the whole, to be well-
balanced readings of the books.

Two final contributions round out this volume. Hasnain and 
Rajyashree's "Hindustani as an Anxiety between Hindi-Urdu 
Commitment" and Trivedi's "The anxiety of Hindustani" are both 
ruminations on historical, political and sociological factors behind the 
convergence and divergence of Hindi and Urdu. These two chapters 
may be seen as an often impassioned dialog concerning the 
polarization of two varieties of a language along social and national 
lines. The concern over the loss of Urdu as a medium in post-
Independence India recalls to me the laments of Mughal poets over 
the loss of a courtly society (three hundred years ago), underlining the 
fact that language loyalty in South Asia is often emotionally informed.

EVALUATION

Donegan and Stampe's paper adds to the growing literature that is 
skeptical of the primary role of areal influence in the development of 
individual South Asian languages. In footnote 13, they observe 
approvingly that my 1993 study of object marking in certain Dravidian 
verbs is not exactly paralleled by the incorporation of pronominal 
objects in Munda languages. In my paper, "Morphological 
convergence in the Khondmals (Steever 1981)," I present a more 
elaborate case for the independent development of object-marking 
verbs in Dravidian and Munda, rather than having one directly 
influence the other.

Singh and Singh's paper conjectures that some forms of 
nominalization they cover are spreading through the lexicon, but do 
not identify the grammatical (sociolinguistic?) channels through which 
they are spreading. This chapter has the feeling of being an appendix 
to a larger project, one which I hope we will see. Reading was greatly 
hampered by the fact that none of the Bangla words are provided with 
translations, which will render the article largely opaque to non-Bangla 
speakers.

In connection with Annamalai's first paper, my paper "Noun 
incorporation in Tamil (Steever 1981)," discusses certain nouns that 
are incorporated into verbs (and appear in the nominative case) but 
do not directly reflect semantic roles or argument structure. That such 
forms have any case marking, the unmarked nominative case, reflects 
the fact that as nouns in Tamil, these predicates must be pronounced 
with nominal morphology. Controlling for this in a further development 
of the ideas put forth in his chapter would allow the author to hone in 
more closely on argument structure and semantic roles. There is one 
misspelling: p. 61 nalllavaanaa should be nallavaanaa.

With the small sample of Bangla forms in Paul's brief article, it is 
difficult to determine whether the specifications he ascribes to certain 
auxiliary, or vector, verbs tend more toward lexical idiosyncrasies or 
grammatical generalizations. A larger sampling, the use of "negative 
data" and attention to Vendler-type categories such as 
accomplishment, achievement, etc. may permit the author eventually 
to make more specific observations.

The issue of documenting endangered languages, of which there are 
many in the subcontinent, is addressed directly only in Smith, Paauw 
and Hussainmiya's article and obliquely in Bhatia's report. The latter 
presents a synopsis of Gail Coelho's University of Texas dissertation 
on the Dravidian language Betta Kurumba. Given the devastation of 
the December 26 tsunami to marginal communities and, therefore, to 
their languages, particularly in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, I 
hope that future volumes in this series will want to take up this 
important topic with more of a focus.

Overall, the contents of the volume reflect the broad diversity of 
linguistic perspectives scholars bring to bear on the languages of the 
subcontinent. Descriptive, areal, historical, psycholinguistic and other 
orientations are currently being brought to bear on South Asia's 
languages. It is, in fact, a pleasure to read a collection whose 
constituent articles do not all revolve around a specific grammatical 
theme or theoretical framework. The editor has done a fine job in 
making these studies and concerns available to general linguists.

The one significant problem with this volume, as with its immediate 
predecessor, is the lack of an index. Given the number of indexing 
utilities currently available to publishers, this oversight ought not 
persist in subsequent volumes.

REFERENCES

Steever, Sanford. 1981. Selected papers in Tamil and Dravidian 
linguistics. Madurai: Muttu Patippakam.

Steever, Sanford. 1993. Analysis to synthesis: The development of 
complex verb forms in Dravidian. Oxford and New York: Oxford 
University Press. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Sanford Steever's interests include syntax, morphology and historical 
linguistics. He has studied and researched various languages of 
South Asia, including Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Pali, Sinhala, Kodagu 
and Kurux. His book, "The Tamil auxiliary verb system," is being 
released this summer.





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